Climate Change? Nahhh ...

Saying it over and over again doesn't make it any less dumb.

When Harvard's endowment divests from oil and gas companies, it is trying to please its donors, many of whom are concerned by the harm to the planet the products of those companies cause. There is nothing religious about this. What they are focused on couldn't be any more tangible and real.

For decades, there have been people sounding the alarm about the negative consequences of CO2 emissions and globally few people cared or did anything. Now we are getting extreme climate and weather events and it is waking some people up. The level of awareness has been raised, and there are more people who are concerned enough that they are advocating for various actions. Those people are not religious zealots.

These are simply people who are advocating for an action to try to combat a perceived problem. My problem with the woman who wrote that divestment article was that she was not openly acknowledging the costs of the action she was advocating for. And most people are going to care about that. But she's not a religious zealot. She's not someone who believes in fairy tales and worships invisible things. She is someone who is focused on something very real.

Just because the action of those investment funds is unlikely to have any immediate practical effect, doesn't make what they are doing into a "religion," either. Any more than when you make choices based on your values and preferences every day, there isn't someone following you around calling you a religious zealot in an attempt to try to be dismissive of your choice. When you choose a Coke instead of a Pepsi (for whatever your reasons), do you create a tedious "religion" narrative around it?